Michael Fassbender on playing Bobby Sands in Hunger

Michael Fassbender has done sci-fi, sword-and-sandal and slasher movies. But
his latest role, as the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, a part which he
starved himself for 10 weeks to play, means he will be taken seriously from
now on.

By Sheryl Garratt

12:01AM BST 18 Oct 2008

'Shall I show you something that's really going to make you laugh - and cringe?' grins Michael Fassbender. We are sitting in the back of a cosy, shabby-chic pub in London's East End not far from the 31-year-old actor's home in Hackney, and I have been asking how it feels, after a decade of steady work, to finally break through with a lead role in the acclaimed film Hunger.

He pushes his Guinness aside and puts a foot up on the table to show me his new trainers, which have been customised with his name down the side in big, white capitals. After the film won the prestigious Caméra d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Nike invited him to its store to pick out things for his agent, his girlfriend and himself. 'Really kitsch, aren't they?' he laughs. 'The next thing is the robe with my initials on it!'

A triumphant directorial debut for the Turner Prize-winning British video artist Steve McQueen, Hunger has subsequently won awards at the Venice and Toronto film festivals. The film is extraordinary, as is Fassbender's central performance as the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands.

Hunger is set in the notorious H-blocks of the Maze prison in Belfast in 1981, when convicted IRA men were fighting against the withdrawal of Special Category Status, which no longer recognised them as political prisoners. They refused to wear prison uniforms, going naked except for blankets, and when prevented from using the lavatories unless they were dressed, they smeared their excrement on the cell walls in what became known as the dirty protest. When this failed to get them heard they began hunger strikes, with their leader, Sands, a 27-year-old father-of-one convicted for possession of a firearm, being the first of 10 men to starve himself to death.

McQueen was 11 and living in London when the hunger strikes began, and he vividly remembers seeing Bobby Sands's image on the television news every night. Sands died on May 5, 1981, a few weeks after the Brixton riots and a few days before Tottenham Hotspur won the FA Cup, and all three events were formative for the artist. 'It was a coming-of-age situation,' he says. 'It stuck in my psyche.'

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McQueen, 38, has always worked with moving images, and one of his most widely known pieces, 1997's Deadpan, is a restaging of the classic Buster Keaton stunt, where the side of a house collapses on to him but he escapes unscathed thanks to a strategically placed window. When McQueen was approached by Film4 to make a full-length feature, he never doubted that Sands would be the subject. But he admits he wasn't as sure about Fassbender. 'When I first saw him, I thought he was a bit cocky,' McQueen says. 'I didn't warm to him. You must understand, I had never done auditions before. I'd never been in that kind of situation, and I didn't know how vulnerable actors are in auditions, that cockiness can often be covering nerves.'

At the urging of his producer and casting director, McQueen saw Fassbender again. They talked, 'and there was an understanding between us that was interesting. We just clicked. That conversation made me think, "Yes. That's the guy."'

Though there are moments of real beauty and tenderness in the film, the opening section evokes the atmosphere of the H-blocks so vividly that you feel as if you are in there. This isn't a film that you can passively watch. You smell the urine trickling down corridors, hear the oppressive silence just before violence breaks out, and most of all feel the scars violence leaves not only on its victims, but also on its perpetrators. 'It's very visceral and all the senses are at work,' Fassbender agrees. 'That's very important to Steve. He's awake to it all. So you're in this prison, and the audience is in this prison - all of you are in there together.'

Despite its polarising subject matter, the film is also curiously apolitical, refusing to make a hero of Sands or monsters of his guards. At core it is about humanity, and the extremes we are all capable of. The guards treat their prisoners with a brutality that is almost unbearable to watch; stripped of everything, the prisoners respond by using their bodies as weapons. At first, the story is told with very little dialogue, reflecting the prisoners' lack of voice in the outside world. The middle section, however, is a verbal tour de force, where a priest desperately tries to persuade Sands not to begin his slow suicide, on moral grounds.

Before shooting started, Liam Cunningham, who plays the priest, moved into the Belfast flat Fassbender had rented, and the two men went over the script, again and again. 'We hit it off straight away,' Fassbender says. 'I think they were worried we'd be out on the lash every night.'

The 20-minute scene was shot in one long take with a single camera focused on the two men. 'We did five takes, and that was it,' Fassbender says. 'I knew then that it was going to be something special. Steve has never worked with actors before, and he speaks very unconventionally, yet directly on the money. To have an artist who must see things so clearly in his own head, but who also has the communication skills to bring everybody else in line with his vision - that's pretty impressive. When he talks to you, it's clear as day. For me, it's great to have at least one film where I can say, "I did that, I was part of that." I've achieved something now.'

Fassbender was born in Heidelberg, Germany. His mother, Adele, is originally from Northern Ireland and his father, Josef, is German. When Michael was two they settled in Killarney in the Irish Republic where they own a well-regarded restaurant, West End House. Adele runs the front of house, Josef the kitchen. 'His rack of lamb is excellent,' Fassbender says. 'I was pretty spoilt, food-wise, growing up.'

According to family lore Adele is the great-great-niece of Michael Collins, the revolutionary who helped found modern Ireland. 'We're only going by my grandfather's word, but - I believe it' Fassbender says. (He played Collins in the play Allegiance opposite Mel Smith's Churchill at the Edinburgh Festival two years ago.) Politics were never discussed at home, though Adele always stressed to Michael and his elder sister, Catherine, that any kind of violence was wrong. The conflict in Northern Ireland rarely impinged on their lives in Killarney, although when they went to visit cousins there, he remembers being shocked by the checkpoints and helicopters. 'Whenever I went up to visit my relatives across the border, people even in the south would be like, "Oh my God, you're going to get bombed!"'

Fassbender became interested in drama at school and when he was 18 he put together a theatrical production of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs with friends. 'It's that naivety that gets things done, that lets you go for it and learn from your mistakes,' he says. 'People like De Niro, Pacino, were in their late twenties when they made their best films, and when I was 17, 18, I remember thinking, "God, that's ages away!"'

He came to London at the age of 19 to go to the Central School of Speech and Drama, dropped out in the last year after getting an agent, and almost immediately toured in Chekhov's Three Sisters with the Oxford Stage Company. His first major television role was the 2001 Steven Spielberg-produced Second World War drama Band of Brothers. 'I thought, "This is it, now, here we go! Hollywood is next!"' he laughs. 'But there were so many of us running around in green.'

There were long stints of bar work between jobs until Hex, a cult supernatural series made for Sky in 2004, in which he played a fallen angel out to seduce a schoolgirl witch. As a result, Fassbender fan sites run by teenage girls and SF/comic book geeks abound online. 'They've been great on those sites, amazing,' he grins. 'I hardly ever use a computer, so I could never do anything like that - they've even made up showreels for me.'

Since then, he has moved fairly smoothly from job to job. He played a Spartan warrior in the 2007 Hollywood blockbuster 300, which he says got him into rooms for more high-level meetings. He currently has two films out. He plays a frustrated painter in François Ozon's enjoyable melodrama Angel, centred on an untalented but hugely successful romance novelist (Romola Garai). Eden Lake is a very British take on the blood-spattered slasher genre, in which a middle-class couple (Fassbender and Kelly Reilly) on a camping trip are menaced by a group of hard-faced working-class teenagers complete with savage rottweiler, loud rap music and a white-van-man dad. He defends this when I somewhat ungraciously point out the gaping holes in the plot, saying he enjoyed the fact that his character was so helpless: 'It's quite nice that the guy doesn't end up being the hero. That's what drew me to it, initially.'

Clearly the quality of work has gone up a notch or two this year. When we met he was working in London, finishing up Andrea Arnold's next film Fish Tank, in which he plays a leading role as the mysterious stranger who turns around the life of a disaffected 15-year-old girl. Soon after, he will be off to Berlin to start shooting Tarantino's long-awaited Second World War epic Inglorious Bastards. He plays Lt Hicox, an English film critic who teams up with the Americans of the title.

'It's a stonker of a script,' he says. 'I'm really excited. Tarantino is a real, all-encompassing film-maker. There don't seem to be any barriers with him, that enthusiasm seems genuine and free-flowing. I love Berlin, as well. It's got this forward-thinking, open-minded, creative buzz. I'd be very interested in moving there.'

Before filming the final act of Hunger, production shut down for 10 weeks so that Fassbender could drop about 3st in order to play the dying Sands. He went to LA, renting a place near Venice Beach: 'It was the perfect place because I was just another freak on the beach, power walking.'

Fassbender says he talked it over with his family before taking the role. He even did a two-week trial fast, to see how it would feel. 'But once I make up my mind, I just do it,' he says. 'And certainly after we'd finished filming that first section, I knew I wasn't doing it for something that my heart wasn't in. It was a measured thing. You can monitor it. I thought I could do it within safe parameters.'

Both McQueen and Fassbender were adamant that there was no other way. Indeed, when the latter returned to Belfast weighing 9st, McQueen was worried he still might not be thin enough.

Fassbender underwent medical checks throughout, and after meeting with a nutritionist, he settled on a diet of berries, nuts and sardines, eating 900 calories a day for the first five weeks until his weight levelled, forcing him to cut down still further. He skipped, did yoga, and walked four and a half miles a day, but says the nights were hard: he had difficulty sleeping, and for two weeks he barely slept at all. 'You don't realise how much food is on television, how much food titillation,' he says. 'Especially in America.'

He didn't see friends - 'I wasn't really good company, and it was a distraction' - although he did meet up with his sister, a neuro-psychologist who now lives in Sacramento, for Christmas dinner. 'She was pregnant so she was off the booze, and I was trying not to eat. Her hormones were going, but I was definitely the crankier of the two of us.

'It is such a psychological prison. I had to calorie-count, and I'd catch myself every now and again picking things up in shops, reading the label and putting it back - and wonder what I looked like. You're totally focused on that, obsessing about numbers.'

The experience changed him, he says. 'There were times when I woke up in the morning and just felt so grateful. When you take away things that you can usually have so readily, all those things you take for granted, then you do become much more gracious. I felt pretty strong - but hungry.'

McQueen adds, 'I understand now why in lots of religions fasting is part of the ritual, because it makes people look at themselves. Michael is a very attractive man, and I would imagine people are drawn to him. But the more of that stuff that was stripped away from him, the more sensitive he became. When he came back, he didn't talk to anyone on set. He'd shoot the scene then go back to his room, so I was the only one he spoke to. And the relationship between us was really special. It wouldn't have happened under any other circumstance. It was at a higher level. And when it was over, it was a bit of a come-down, if I'm honest.'

When the film wrapped, the first thing that Fassbender ate was sushi. 'I was stuffed,' he recalls. 'And I was freezing, because my body wasn't used to handling food. That was really interesting. And then the weight went on really quickly. In maybe two weeks, I was only about three kilos less than what I'd normally be.'

His parents came to Cannes to see the film, and I wonder if it was painful for them seeing him that way. He shrugs, and says he was right next to them at the time, looking healthy and well. 'It was quite emotional. They were pretty proud, I think.'

After Cannes he went straight back to South Africa to finish shooting the upcoming Channel 4 drama The Devil's Whore, set in the English Civil War and starring John Simm and Andrea Riseborough. He had originally auditioned for the part of the villain, a mercenary from the 30 Years War. 'But he was so clearly the blue-eyed hero,' says the director Marc Munden, who instead gave him the part of Rainsborough, a colonel in the Leveller movement. 'He had something about him that was very compelling to watch on the screen. He got the gentlemanly nature of the character, as well as his passion for politics.'

As Munden points out, Fassbender's star is rising spectacularly, but he doesn't seem to be taking it too seriously. 'It's a lottery game,' Fassbender shrugs, 'and I'm thrilled to be in this position. This is what you hope for, at the beginning. But it's all about who's bankable, and who's got a bit of heat around them at the moment, and that's all it is. That's happening to me a bit now, and we'll see what happens from here on, but it will be somebody else in six months', even three months' time.'

'Hunger' opens on October 31. 'The Devil's Whore' is on Channel 4 from November 19